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circethesinner · 1 year

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inevitable ⟐ xavier thorpe

pairing: xavier thorpe x reader oneshot (second person pov - she/her pronouns used for reader - occasional use of Y/N)

warning(s) : mild language, best friends to lovers, mutual pining

word count: 6.4k

⭑•⊱✩masterlist✩⊰•⭑

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summary: you and xavier had been best friends since you were 7, and nothing could change that - that is until you start to develop a new power that makes you question everything you think (or rather, what everyone else thinks)

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Normies usually strayed away from adopting outcast kids. They just didn’t know how to appropriately handle their slightly more complex needs.

Unfortunately for your adopted mothers, the realisation that you, their child, possessed psychic abilities hit at around the 5-year mark when they walked into your nursery and discovered that all of your bears were floating around the room, performing beautiful and elaborate ariel tricks. At first, they jumped to the conclusion that they were being haunted. In some ways, they wished that were the case. Ghosts could be exorcised, but a child who could undo a childproof lock (or five) to get into the cabinet where the candy was kept within mere seconds wasn’t easily fixed with a call to the local priest.

So, as soon as they could, they would ship you off to outcast summer camps and school programs. It's not that they didn’t love you; they just didn’t know how to help you manoeuvre your powers.

Naturally, you resented this for a lot of your childhood. You couldn’t understand why your adopted siblings got all the time with your moms while you were sent away. Fortunately, as you matured, you grew to understand it and accept that what they were doing was for your benefit as much as theirs. Your moms were doing this to help you learn more about your powers from others who shared them, not punish you for having them.

Of course, understanding and accepting the decisions didn’t exactly make the feeling of abandonment go away, but it was enough to subdue and push it down for some therapist in 20 years to pull out and deal with.

There were some plus sides to being sent away so often, one of which being the best friend you had made on day one of the very first outcast summer camp you had been sent to when you were 7 years old.

You and Xavier Thorpe got along like a log cabin on fire, which is coincidentally what almost got the pair of you kicked out of that summer camp on your first week.

Xavier was sent away by his father while he was on tour. Touring the world would be far too stressful for a child; at least, that was the excuse that was given whenever anyone questioned where Xavier was.

Both of you being sent to Nevermore Academy was inevitable. Under the promise of not burning it down, together, you had fixed up the old shed so Xavier could use it as an art studio. You had occupied one of the corners where the two of you had set up a desk where you could work on your writing.

Together, you spent most of your free time tucked away like that, talking about anything and everything as you individually let your artistic creativity fill your individual pages. You would only stop talking when you demanded silence so you could focus, which would last about 10 minutes before the two of you got distracted and started talking about something else.

You were about 6 minutes into one of these silent periods when Xavier slowly stepped back from his canvas and inched towards your corner. Engrossed in your work, you didn’t notice he was in front of you until he spoke up.

“You’ve got some paint on your nose,” He pointed out. You closed your laptop instinctively; you had never liked sharing your writing with anyone, not even Xavier.

You looked up at him in confusion as you hadn’t touched any of the paint scattered around the studio that day. “Really?” You asked, crossing your eyes to try and look at your nose. “Are you sure? I don’t feel-” You were cut off by Xavier swiping his thumb over your nose and smearing some paint on it.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” He laughed, trying to step back as you made a grab for his arm. You just about caught his sleeve and used it as leverage to pull him down and wipe your nose clean with it.

“You are such an ass!” You groaned, trying to hide the laughter that threatened to bubble up. It was the third time that week he’d gotten you with that trick.

“Speaking of ass,” Xavier grabbed his own chair to sit opposite you at your desk.

“I have a great one?” You grinned, trying to use a tissue to wipe the remaining paint residue from your face. “Thank you, I know!” You froze when you could have sworn you had heard Xavier respond with a quiet ‘true’ but shook it off as your mind playing tricks as you hadn’t actually seen his lips move.

“That is not what I was going to say,” Xavier playfully rolled his eyes. “Speaking of ass, have you done Mr Cooper’s homework?”

“Are you suggesting Mr Cooper is an ass, or that he has a great ass? I mean, I’ve never looked myself, but I respect the-” You yelped out as your leg received a kick from under the desk. You pouted dramatically as he shook his head at you, but you cast your mind back to your chemistry class the day before. You hadn’t been paying much attention as it was the final class on a Friday, and you were just excited to sleep past 6am the following day. “Did he assign homework?”

“I’ll take that as a no; you haven’t done it,” Xavier grabbed his rucksack, which you had been using as a footrest. “Though I already knew that because I picked up your sheet when you left it on the desk.” He pulled the worksheet out and waved it in front of your face.

“This is such bullshit!” You groaned as you plucked it from his grip and scanned the questions. “He never assigns homework!”

“I think the words you’re looking for are ‘Thank you, Xavier! You are such a good friend!’” Xavier teased, doing his best impression of you… His best was awful.

“A good friend would have just done the assignment for me,” You sighed dramatically, putting the sheet down on the desk and pushing it back towards him.

“You mean the way I do half of your other assignments for you?” He pointed out. You had mastered one another's handwriting years ago and often took turns in doing one another’s assignments depending on who was better at the subject or who could bribe the other better.

“Yeah, half of them!” You fired back. “That only makes you half of a good friend, an okay friend, if you will!” Your friendship was built on this sort of playful teasing.

“Well, as an okay friend, do you want to work on this together after dinner?” He asked, checking the time on his phone. “Which started like 5 minutes ago.”

“Shit!” You exclaimed, shooting up from your chair and shoving your laptop in your bag. “Come on! Get your butt in gear, or all the good food will be gone!” You frantically urged, walking around the desk to tug at Xavier’s arm to get him up and going.

“I’m coming!” He laughed back, getting up intentionally slowly. “Just give me a minute or two to pack up all my stuff. Save me a tray!” With a distressed groan that echoed through the shed, you let go of his arm and walked off, mumbling something along the lines of ‘snooze, you lose’ as you went. Xavier laughed and checked the time again one last time before he stuffed his phone back in his pocket, knowing that dinner wouldn’t actually be ready for another hour and preparing for the hellfire that you would rain down on him when you realised he’d tricked you again.

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Studying sucked. That was something you had acknowledged a long time ago. But studying while you had a bad case of hiccups was so much worse. Especially when the hiccups caused your powers to go absolutely wild; with each hiccup, the pen you were holding flew out of your hand and launched itself to a new corner of the room.

At first, Xavier thought it was an elaborate plot to get him to do your work again as revenge for the dinner incident. However, when your pen launched out of your hand and stabbed the door, he realised you weren’t joking around.

With a grunt of frustration, you got up to retrieve the pen once again, mumbling a ‘sorry’ to the door as you pulled it out from the wood.

“What did that poor door ever do to you to deserve such a vicious stabbing?” Xavier joked, trying to lighten up your tense mood.

“Don’t tell me you forgot about the time it smacked me on the ass on the way out!” You gave the door an accusatory glare. “Which it still hasn’t apologised for.”

“How could I forget?” He groaned, recalling the situation in great detail. He’d talked himself into a corner when he’d tried to defend the door by saying that your ass just got in the way and then couldn’t figure out if it would be more offensive to say that your butt was big or backtrack and say that it wasn’t big at all. In the end, he realised he was losing that conversation no matter what he said and just accepted the consequences. “You know, that is the second conversation today that has ended up on your ass.”

You couldn’t contain the laughter at the phrasing, which caused your hiccups to match the energy, and the pen flew from your hand and into the ceiling.

“Oooookay! I think that’s enough pen time for you, or I’m going to be accused of practising archery in my room again,” Xavier laughed nervously as you, still in fits of giggles, stumbled back over to the spare bed in his room that you had basically taken over as your own. It had your favourite blanket draped over it and some of your pillows from home.

“Your hiccups are just like you,” Xavier pointed out, jumping up to get the pen out of the ceiling before it caused any structural damage. He was tall, so it didn’t take much to reach it.

“Oh yeah?” You asked, your laughter finally starting to calm down. “How's that?”

“Violent and cute,” He shook his head with a smile, but you just froze, unsure if you had heard him right.

“What was that?” You asked.

“Violent,” He repeated, dropping the pen onto his desk.

“No, no,” You shook your head, questioning your own sanity a little. He didn’t have that teasing tone in his voice he usually did. “The second thing.”

“I only said one thing?” He looked at you in confusion. “Are you feeling okay?” As if on queue, you hiccuped again, and a pillow went flying across the room, narrowly avoiding hitting him in the face.

“Never better,” You mumbled, laying back on the bed. You really could have sworn you had heard him say that the hiccups and you, by extension, were cute. It was quieter than he usually spoke, but you could have sworn it in his voice.

Even though you joked around a lot, he wouldn’t lie to you about saying or not saying something if you asked. So maybe it had just been in your head? It was a weird thing for your head to make up.

“Are you staying here again tonight?” Xavier asked, snapping you out of your spiralling thoughts. “We can watch a movie and finish off those cookies from last night?”

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” You smiled sheepishly, glancing over at the trash can by his desk to see the empty packet still there, evidence of your crime. “But I ate the rest of those cookies while you were asleep last night.”

“I know. I woke up and saw you at the end of my bed, hunched over like a little gremlin, shoving them into your mouth three at a time. I thought you were a sleep paralysis demon for a good few seconds. I wanted to record it, but you were like a wild animal, and I didn’t want to startle you by grabbing my phone,” A second pillow flew across the room and hit him in the face that time. Unlike the last, this one was intentionally flung at him. Laughing, he paid no mind to it and reached over the side of his bed and pulled something out from underneath. “I bought two packs and hid one from you- wait, are these open?”

“I may or may not have found those ones while you were in the shower,” You got up and flopped down onto his bed next to him, grabbing both of your pillows to lean on. “I didn’t eat them all, though! I won’t lie; I would have, but you came back before I could.” Rolling his eyes, Xavier reached under his pillow and pulled something else out.

“I bought the third pack,” He admitted, placing them down on the bed in between the two of you. “Hey, your hiccups are gone!” You were about to cheer when another hiccup bubbled up out of nowhere, sending the open pack of cookies flying everywhere.

“Well….” You looked around at the crumbs that scattered the once relatively clean room. “Shit.”

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You woke up groggily to your name being called out in a hushed whisper. When you opened your eyes, you realised it was still nighttime. Yawning, you pushed off the sheets you had been sleeping under and made your way over to Xavier’s bed.

It was a routine you knew all too well by that point. Part of you questioned why you even bothered sleeping in the spare bed in the first place. Almost every time you would sleep over in his room, you would fall asleep in the spare bed only to be woken up by Xavier after a couple of hours, usually because he’d had a nightmare. He didn’t ever want to talk about it, and you didn’t ask. He’d tell you about them when they were really bad, but he preferred to sketch them out.

Xavier was holding the covers up, and you crawled under them, bringing your arms to your chest using his arm as a pillow. He brought the covers down again over you both, and you closed your tired eyes once again.

That was how you usually slept in the same bed. You didn’t usually ‘cuddle’ when you slept like this. Your arms and legs always kept to themselves, with the exclusion of Xavier’s left arm, which you usually used as a pillow. However, this time, Xavier brought his spare arm over you and held you close to him. Instinctively, you moved one of your arms to wrap around him in return. It was a wordless sign to say that you were okay with this. You could have sworn you had heard a hum of contentment from him, but you passed it off as the start of a snore. Xavier always fell asleep fast, and his light snoring was comforting.

You chalked the change in behaviour up to a particularly bad dream and decided that you wouldn’t bring it up in the morning. Instead, you would just enjoy the added warmth for the night.

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“Enid, my sweet, your tag is sticking out,” You jogged ahead to catch up with Enid’s impossibly fast walking. “C’mere!” Enid stopped and took a step back so you could tuck the tag of her sweater back in.

“Thank you!” She cheered and held her arm out. “Walk and talk?” With a laugh, you linked arms with Enid and started walking together. “I’m so glad you’re here because I was supposed to be shopping with Yoko, but then Divina showed up, and I was totally third wheeling, so I left them to it.”

“Are they actually dating yet, or are they both too scared to make the first move?” You asked, causing Enid to laugh.

“They’re still dodging around the question,” She sighed playfully. “Reminds me of you and Xavier.”

“What?” You stopped, pulling Enid to a halt with you.

“I said they’re still dodging around the question,” She repeated.

“No, no,” You shook your head. “The other thing you said!”

��That was all I said?” Enid looked ask confused as you felt inside. “Are you feeling okay?” Instead of pushing things and questioning them further, you took a deep breath and shook it off. Enid was a terrible liar. You had probably just mistaken the wind for words or something.

“I’m fine. Everything is fine,” You smiled and shrugged. Together, you continued to walk.

“Did you have a fight with Xavier or something?” Enid asked. Glancing at her from the corner of your eye, you shook your head with a frown, wondering how she’d come to that conclusion. “He was pouting at breakfast today, and you’re here without him.” Realisation dawned on you, and you laughed.

“He wasn’t pouting!- No, actually, that’s a lie. He was pouting a little bit, but only because he felt sorry for himself,” You explained. “I mistook him for my alarm clock this morning and tried to hit the snooze button, which in this case happened to be his mouth, and now his lip is a bit swollen. I’m here to get an apology gift and some numbing gel.” You reached into your pocket and pulled out the numbing gel you had just picked up from the pharmacy and a bar of chocolate. You had technically bought 3 bars of chocolate, but you had already given in and eaten 2 of them, and the last one was on thin ice.

“How did he get into your room?” Enid asked. “If I remember correctly, which I know I do, your windows have enchanted locks on because he kept sneaking into your room last term.”

You snorted as you remembered how many times Xavier’s tall figure had been caught trying to climb through your window. Or, more accurately, how many times he had gotten stuck trying to climb through your window, and you had to call for help to get him unstuck.

“I was in his room,” You explained with a shrug. “He’s got a spare bed, and I love Yoko, but goddamn, does the girl snore like a chainsaw. Plus, she wakes up at 6am every morning and starts playing her ‘meditation’ music. I usually stay with him on the weekends because it's the only decent sleep I get! I swear I’ve told you all of this before?”

“The Yoko part you have definitely complained about to me on multiple occasions,” Enid confirmed. “But how am I only just learning that you have weekly sleepovers with your ‘best friend’.” She used her free hand to put air quotes around the last two words.

“Why are you saying it like that?” You asked. “He is my best friend? You know I love you, Wednesday, and Thing, but Xavier and I have been ride or die since we were seven. He earnt the best friend title way before I knew any of you.”

“Just admit you both like one another,” Enid groaned, causing you to stop walking again, halting her.

“What are you on about?” You interrogated. “We like one another as friends.”

“I said nothing!” Enid protested, her face easily portraying the confusion she felt. You were about to protest again, but Enid spoke before she could. “No, Y/N, I literally said nothing! Whatever you think you heard, it wasn’t me! Maybe your mind is telling you what you want it to hear?”

“Absolutely not! I heard you! It was your voice!” Your phone started ringing before the conversation could progress any further. You didn’t have to check the contact before answering it. You had set a personalised ringtone for him. “Xavi, I’m on my way back now, I swear! I have the gel and a-” You stopped yourself before you mentioned the chocolate. Truthfully, you knew it would never even get back to Nevermore. “I have the gel!” You repeated.

“I will start this movie without you and then spoil all of it,” He threatened playfully.

“Don’t you dare!” You gasped, but he’d already hung up. When you looked back up at Enid, expecting to continue the conversation you had been having, you recognised the look on her face as her signature ‘I’m telling everyone’ smile. “What?”

“Xavi?” She teased. “Really?” “Drop it, and I’ll split the chocolate with you,” You bargained, pulling the sweet snack out of your pocket again and waving it around. Enid simply responded by holding her arm out so you could carry on walking together and her other hand ready to receive her share of chocolate.

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“This show has gone to shit,” You groaned, sinking down into the sheets in disappointment.

“What?” Xavier pulled his head away from the screen to watch your movements instead. “You used to love it. It was all you’d talk about.”

“I did love it!” You agreed with a sigh. “But then they had to add all that forced romance in, and there are like 7 different love triangles that all interlock- it’s a pyramid scheme of love!”

“A pyramid scheme of love?” He laughed at your phrasing. “God, could you imagine the dm’s you’d get from people you’ve only spoken to once who had joined that?”

“Hey, girlboss! Long time no speak!” You put on your best bubbly voice as you spoke, replicating one of your moms’ friends who had been pulled into 8 different pyramid schemes. “Are you tired of settling down the old-fashioned way with one person? I was too! But insert a name of a multi-level marketing scheme here helped me take control of my love life!”

“Please never do that voice again,” Xavier pleaded through laughter.

“I think I gave myself a headache doing that,” You snorted, bringing your hand up to your head. It was a fruitless endeavour as you pulled them away again immediately. “Urgh, my hands are too warm. C’mere, you always have cold hands.” You grabbed one of his hands and held it up to your forehead, leaning against it.

“I always have cold hands?” Despite his verbal confusion, he didn’t protest about you using him as a cold pack. “Is that… a good thing?”

“On this occasion, yes,” You smiled contently, closing your eyes. “During the colder months, not so much.”

“If we held hands more, it would warm them up,” You almost didn’t catch his words.

“You wanna hold hands more?” You asked, confused. Admittedly, you already held hands probably more than most friends did, but that was because you had a tendency to get lost in crowds. It was hand-holding, or one of those leash backpacks parents used on their kids, but Xavier shut that down as soon as you jokingly suggested it.

“How did you-?” Xavier pulled his hand away from you with a frown. You pouted at the lack of contact and opened your eyes again. He paused to look at you, searching for an answer in your eyes, but he gave up as soon as he’d started and just shook his head. “Sorry, I didn’t think I said that out loud.”

“We can hold hands more,” You shrugged, smiling at him. “Come on, let's try and get a couple more episodes of this nauseating shitfest in before I have to go back to my own room.”

Xavier perked up at that, leaning over to press play on the next episode.

“I’m calling it now; there will be an unexpected kiss by the end of this episode,” You sighed, leaning your head on Xavier’s shoulder as your eyes settled back on the screen.

“If we’re placing bets, it’ll be between those two,” He added, pointing at the pairing on the screen. You really could have sworn you had heard him say ‘between us?’ just before the actual words left his lips. But you knew for a fact this time that he hadn’t, as the words slightly overlapped, and, as far as you knew, Xavier wasn’t secretly a talented ventriloquist. Though you supposed if you did know that, it wouldn’t be a secret.

Instead, you brushed it off as your tired mind playing tricks on you. Weird tricks for a weird mind.

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Four more days.

That’s how long it took you to realise what was going on. Or rather, what you thought was going on. You had to test your theory out, and you knew the perfect person to help.

“Enter,” Wednesday’s voice instructed before you even had a chance to knock on her door. Without questioning how she’d know you were there, you opened the door and closed it behind you once you were in Wednesday’s shared room with Enid.

“I need your help testing a theory,” You pleaded, leaning against the door. “I feel like I’m going crazy- and not the good kind.”

“There’s a bad kind?” Wednesday’s tone barely changed, but you knew her well enough to know she was teasing you in her own way. “I’m intrigued; go on.”

“I think I can read minds,” You confessed with a groan. “Not all the time; I think I can only do it if I’m purposely seeking them out or if the thoughts are… loud.”

“I imagine there are some people who have very loud thoughts,” Wednesday glanced over at Enid’s side of the room.

“Exactly!” You nodded. “And I wanted to test with you because I know I won’t just be reading your body language and facial expressions for clues.”

“What number am I thinking now?” Wednesday asked, turning her head away from you to look at her desk. Closing your eyes, you tried to push for the connection that you had felt when you accidentally used this possible new power on Ajax just a few minutes beforehand. He had been moping around, and you wanted to know why. It turns out he’d stoned himself again and had missed all of his morning classes, and subsequently got in trouble for being ‘careless’. He was banned from visiting Jericho for two weeks.

When you had sympathised with his struggles and offered to buy him some snacks when you next visited Jericho, he’d looked at you like you had grown a second head which had started speaking Latin. He asked how you had known he was banned. After some confusion and back and forth, you made up some lie about overhearing one of the teachers say something about it and excused yourself.

“37,” You announced confidently to Wednesday as soon as you had felt the connection be made and heard your friend’s monotone voice. It seemed fitting that even her internal monologue was as dry as she was when speaking. “Which US state am I thinking of?”

“Trick question,” You answered proudly. “You’re thinking about Poland, which, unless I missed a memo, isn’t a US state.”

“Very good,” Wednesday didn’t seem the slightest bit surprised that you had gotten it right. “Final one, what line from which of Edgar Allan Poe’s works am I thinking of?” She asked.

“But evil things, in robes of sorrow, assailed the monarch's high estate,” You echoed the exact line out loud. “From The Haunted Palace.”

“I think that settles it,” Wednesday confirmed. You opened your eyes to see her turning around to face you again. “Considering I didn’t say a single word out loud throughout that. Not even the questions.” Wednesday’s mouth was pressed firmly closed, though you could still hear her perfectly clearly.

With a small gasp, you intentionally severed the connection and stopped reading her mind.

“Okay, you can think freely again,” You informed Wednesday. “Thank you for helping me test that.” The door you were leaning on was suddenly pulled open, and you only just managed to catch your footing before you had the chance to fall into Enid.

“Y/N!” Enid instinctively held out her arms, just in case you did still fall. “Why are you here? Are you planning a surprise birthday party for me?”

“Enid, your birthday isn’t for another 9 months,” You shook your head with a smile. “Why would we be planning a surprise party now?”

“Because if you do it too close to the time, I would get suspicious when you were sneaking around making arrangements! But if you start now, by the time I’m thinking of it, the party will have been fully planned!” Enid explained cheerily. “I didn’t realise I’d said the party thing out loud? I hope I didn’t ruin the surprise!”

“You didn’t say it out loud,” Wednesday told her. “Y/N can read minds.”

“That’s why you were being weird with Ajax!” Enid immediately pulled out her phone, but you grabbed it out of her hands. “Hey!”

“Please, please, please don’t say anything to anyone yet!” You pleaded. “I need to talk to people first. I need to talk to the teachers. I don’t want people to think I’m going around snooping in on all of their thoughts. That’s not how it works.”

“How exactly does it work?” Enid asked as you wearily handed her back her phone. You didn’t entirely trust Enid not to at least tell Ajax… and then Yoko… and Divina since she would ‘just hear it anyway’ from Yoko…

“I mean, I don’t know exactly how it works, but from what has happened so far, I need to be talking to someone and wanting to know what they’re thinking. So when I spoke to Ajax earlier, I wanted to know why he was upset, and I guess I accidentally made that brain connection thing happen without realising what it was,” You explained, trying to properly make sense of it yourself and using actual words to describe what happened. “And sometimes people just have one-off loud thoughts that I hear? Some more than others….” Realisation dawned on Enid when she heard the last sentence.

“Well, I’m sorry if my thoughts are too ‘loud’ for you,” She huffed, using air quotes around the word ‘loud’. “I can’t control the volume of my own mind.”

“I know. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way,” You apologised. “But I can’t control what I hear either, at least not yet.”

“Has Xavier thought loudly about how in love with you he is yet?” Enid asked.

“Xavier isn’t in love with me….” You protested but trailed off as you recalled some of the things that you had thought you had heard Xavier say over the past week, only to now realise that some of them may have been thoughts.

“Oops, did I think that one too loudly as well?” Enid smiled slyly, pointing at you. “Wednesday, look at her face. I asked if she’d overheard Xavier thinking about how in love with her he is.”

“I gathered that,” Wednesday mumbled, wanting nothing to do with the whole ‘love’ ordeal.

You remembered the other night when you had talked about there being an unexpected kiss, and you thought he’d said ‘between us?’ over the words he actually did say. It had been a few nights, and you couldn’t remember the tone he’d said- or rather, thought it in. Was he confused? Hopeful? You raked through your brain but couldn’t remember any of the details for the life of you.

And the comment about hand-holding? That was just in a friendly way, friendly hand-holding. You had held hands as friends before, multiple times, you were usually the one to initiate it, and it wasn’t like you were in love with him. You weren’t in love with him at all, right?

Right?

Shit.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

You were. You absolutely were. Whether intentionally or not, you had never allowed yourself to think about it, always pushed the thoughts and feelings down before anything could become of them. Always pulled the weeds up, leaving the roots, not realising the roots were just growing and growing under the surface until one day, your whole garden was full of weeds. Except instead of weeds, they were possible unrequited feelings towards your best friend that threatened to ruin everything you had built up over the years you had known one another.

“I need to go,” You excused yourself and pushed past Enid to get to the door, ignoring whatever she was saying in the process. It would have been some sing-song ‘I told you so’, but your mind was too cluttered to pay attention.

You had to find Xavier and talk to him as soon as possible.

It hadn’t taken long to find him. You knew where he’d be. You always knew where he’d be.

You didn’t knock before letting yourself into the shed; you never had to. It was your shared space.

“Y/N! Are you okay?” Xavier looked at you in concern as you sunk against the door as you closed it behind you. “You look-”

“Xavi, I need you to please be quiet and let me talk at you for a bit because I need to say something now before I mess up the words in my head,” You interrupted him before he could finish. With a small nod, he had agreed. His mouth remained shut while you pulled away from the door and paced back and forth. “I’m just going to cut right to the chase here. I have somehow picked up the power to read minds. I hadn’t done it on purpose until like five minutes ago when Wednesday let me test it on her, and then I came straight to you because you have the right to know because you’re my best friend, and we talk all the time, and sometimes I accidentally hear people’s random thoughts because some thoughts are just really loud and some people have a lot of loud thoughts, like Enid, so I just hear them more, and I’m not saying that you have loud thoughts like that, but I think that maybe sometimes you do, which isn’t a bad thing but I wanted you to be aware so-” You had rambled so much that you hadn’t even noticed that Xavier had crossed the room until he had stopped your frantic pacing and held your face in his hands, squishing your cheeks together in what you assumed was a successful attempt and politely shutting you up.

“Deep breaths and calm down, yeah?” He said it so softly that it worked almost instantly. You hadn’t realised quite how fast your heart had been beating and how heavy your breath had become until he’d stopped and helped slow it down.

You weren’t sure what exactly had caused it, whether it was the fast-talking where one word flew into the next, or the flood of emotions that had hit you, or the fear of how he’d react to it all in the end, or just a mixture of it all. No matter what it was, Xavier had successfully calmed you down.

“Dare I ask which of my thoughts were particularly… loud?” Xavier asked, his hands still cradling your face.

“There were only a few?” You replied uneasily. You thought back, trying to differentiate between everything. It was hard when she didn’t realise what they were when they happened. “There was the… hand holding? I think that was one… and, uh…. you called me violent and… cute?”

“Could be worse!” Xavier breathed a sigh of relief. “Could have accidentally admitted I’m in love with you.” One look at your face was all it took for him to realise what he’d done. You stood there, wide eyes staring at one another, each almost daring the other to make a move.

Xavier broke first.

“That was a loud thought, wasn’t it?” He asked, already knowing the answer.

“It sure was,” You whispered, your hands coming up to take his own away from your face. Dejection crossed his face for a split second but was erased immediately when you just held his hands instead, cradling them against your chest. You broke eye contact, deciding that looking at the ground made talking easier because you didn’t have to worry about analysing every change in his expression to find the answers.

“Was it…. Truthful? Or did you think it jokingly?” You ask hesitantly, worried about the response it would elicit. Truly, you didn’t know if your heart could take it being a joke.

If the lack of response had worried you, when he pulled his hands away it all but shattered you. However, as soon as the pieces of you had been shattered, it was like Xavier scooped them all up again when he reached for your face and pulled you into a kiss.

It wasn’t a soft and gentle kiss. It was clumsy, frantic, and full of emotion and confusion. It wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t have to be, because it was with him.

You returned the kiss as soon as your brain allowed itself to switch back on and be present in the moment. Your arms wrapped around the back of his neck, holding him to you as though you were worried he would change his mind and back away again.

It was over all too soon for your liking, the two of you having no choice but to pull away to gasp in the air again. Xavier’s head ducked down, and he nestled his face into your neck. His breath tickled you as he spoke.

“It scares me how truthful it was,” He admitted, planting a small kiss on your collarbone. “I think I’ve known it for a while, but I didn’t want to risk you not feeling the same way.” He pulled away very suddenly to look at your face again. “Wait, you do feel the same way, right?”

You answered him this time by initiating the kiss yourself. This one was slower, the raw emotions you had both been feeling now having settled as a pleasant buzz in the air as the reality of the situation became clear.

You were two idiot best friends who had been in love with one another for longer than either of you could fathom.

You had always known you’d spend the future together, but now, you could spend your future together.

A/N - so I set out to write what I assumed would be a 2k-ish one-shot... then I think I blacked out and woke up foaming at the mouth 6k words later... if there are any accidental pov/tense changes, please let me know! I wrote this in third person, then decided I wanted it to be second person 5k words in so I went back and edited the whole thing which was a pain in the ass and I had to stop myself from rewriting it a third time in first person

feel free to suggest some more one-shots! I can't promise I'll get to them all, but watching Wednesday has filled me with inspiration and motivation to write! *cough cough* I'd be a sucker for a bianca x reader request *cough cough*

and lemme know if you'd like to be added to a taglist for future wednesday one shots <3

#xavier thorpe x reader #xavier thorpe #xavier x reader #wednesday #xavier thorpe fluff #xavier thorpe imagine #xavier thorpe oneshot #wednesday oneshot #xavier thorpe x you #xavier x you #xavier x y #xavier thorpe x y/n

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slavic-roots-western-mind · 9 months

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How to actually sit down and study📚💻🖨☕️📖📓

You've got the textbook and notebook open, the highlighter uncapped, the coffee steaming and laptop switched on.

Now what? Do I just highlight random keywords and write out key concepts whilst repeating important sounding phrases out loud?

While this may have worked in middle school or maybe even highschool, most college and university courses are an entirely different breed. Weekly pop quizzes and an in depth recap each class?

Highly unlikely, at least in my experience.

Uni very much leaves students to fend for themselves, with studying and learning the material taught in class as your own responsibility.

So what's a student to do? As someone who had to get her act together when starting the IB program, and then tackling university, here's my advice on how to actually study productively.

Create a study plan by breaking down the workload

Break down the workload:

Say you have a French vocab set to learn, an English paper due and an econ group project.

Study and write out your vocab, and then meet with your study group for practice.

Plan your paper research: what is the thesis, find relevant literary sources and highlight pontential useful concepts, do an outline of the points you want to cover, and then plan the dates and time that you'll actually sit down and write it out.

Go over the main econ project points, do your bit and then schedule a meeting with your coursemates to do the whole thing.

3. Create and maintain your study space.

If your space is messy and full of distractions, then your study sessions are probably not going to be as productive as they could be. Eliminate any distractions or at least try to minimize them

4. Join or create study groups!

They can be really useful when you actually study instead of hanging out (i'm guilty as charged unfortunately).

Divide concepts and have each member create a cheat-sheet or a short but detailed guide to share, so that you can cover more ground.

5. Use practise and past papers

You need to know how to actually approach the exam questions so that you can make the best use of your exam time, so familiarize yourself with the paper structure and the type of questions e.g. essay-based, scenario questions, numerical.

6. Take breaks!

Studying is important, but so is your well-being.

Schedule 10-15 min breaks for a quick snack and a stroll, but also 1hr-1.5 hr breaks for a proper meal, to catch up wth friends or to watch a show.

Overall, a study plan and a study group can go a long way in helping you get the most out of your study sessions, so do what's best for you!

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venus-haze · 10 months

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Working for the Knife (Mickey Altieri x Reader)

Summary: It’s been over 15 years since the Windsor College murders, not that they had ever been on your radar. That changes when you get hired at a New York marketing firm where you work closely with Mickey Altieri, alleged Ghostface killer whose charges were dropped after a controversial mistrial. Working so closely together piques your interest in each other, soon spiraling out of control. [This is an AU.]

Note: Female reader implied to be mid-20s or older, but no other descriptors are used. This is based on an anonymous request and also Timothy Olyphant being such a DILF, I had to write something like this (I had Justified era Olyphant in mind while writing this, specifically these gifsets, but you can picture whatever hehe). Creative liberties have obviously been taken. Do not interact if you’re under 18 or post thinspo/ED content.

Word count: 6.8k

Warnings: True crime elements (the reader engages with a lot of true crime content), but obviously this is a fictional serial killer. Mutual stalking/obsession. Sexually explicit content that includes dubious consent fantasy that involves knifeplay; spanking, daddy kink, oral sex (f. receiving). Do not interact if you’re under 18.

For once, you felt like things were going your way. After a little over three years of scraping by at your old job where you were woefully overworked and underpaid, your months-long job search finally came to an end when a mid-sized marketing firm gave you an offer you couldn’t refuse. Sure, you’d taken a huge pay raise and shifted to a hybrid schedule with your new job, but the highlight was undoubtedly Mickey, the only other person on your small team and the type of sexy older man you sure as hell didn’t mind spending your days in the office with.

With the whole company working hybrid or completely remote, people only came in sporadically, as did you and Mickey, only going in on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with the occasional Friday if needed. As a result, you didn’t get much of a chance to meet anyone else who worked there.

Your first week was fully in person, since some of the programs you’d be using for the job were easier to learn if he were there to show you. You certainly weren’t complaining, having plenty of time to get a feel for your new coworker, silently observing and testing the waters with light flirting, which he seemed to return. Maybe you were just a little too hopeful.

“Big plans for the weekend?” you asked when five o’clock rolled around on Friday.

“Got a hot date with Netflix,” he said. “How about you?”

“My friend and I are getting drinks later, but that’s about it.”

“What’s your poison?”

“Anything under $10, if I can help it.”

He grinned. “A woman after my own heart. Don’t have too much fun.”

“I’ll try,” you said, smiling as you began packing your laptop into your bag. “Have a good weekend, Mickey.”

“You too.”

With your first week at your new gig down, you headed to a small bar in Flatbush to celebrate with your best friend and dish the highly anticipated dirt on your hot coworker. Lee was already at the bar when you’d arrived, sitting at a small table and sipping a beer she went ahead and bought herself.

“Drinks are on me,” you said. “I fucking owe you.”

Lee grinned. “Always glad to help.”

You wouldn’t have gotten the job without Lee. She helped you fudge your resume to match the experience on the job listing, gently scamming your way into the position you now held. All week you’d been texting her about how great things were going, and fawning over Mickey, of course.

After joking about ordering top-shelf liquor on your dime, Lee settled on a margarita, undoubtedly the first of many for the night. You returned from the bar with your drinks, more than ready to gush about how much better your new job was compared to the hell of your old one. Nothing could bring down your mood.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, they pay you out the ass and you don’t have to worry about health insurance anymore. Great,” Lee said over her margarita. “I wanna hear about your hot DILF coworker. No detail is too small.”

“Lee, oh my god, it’s not even fair how hot he is. Our desks are right next to each other in an L shape, and I feel like such a weirdo for staring at him all the time. He’s been so nice helping me all week, too. Maybe I’m looking too much into it, but sometimes I feel like he’s being a little flirty?”

“Is he married?”

“No ring, and no mention of any family or long-term relationship. I don’t get it, how could Mickey be single?”

“You don’t hear many people going by Mickey anymore,” she said. “Either he’s a mouse or incredibly Irish.”

“I think he’s Italian,” you mused. “Altieri sounds Italian to me.”

Lee’s eyes widened. “Shut the fuck up.”

“Wait, was that offensive?”

“No, just that you’re working with an alleged serial killer.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” you asked, but she was already busy typing away at her phone.

Suddenly, Lee’s phone was shoved in your face, a your hot coworker’s mugshot front and center in an archived New York Times article from October 1998.

SUSPECT ARRESTED IN WINDSOR COLLEGE KILLINGS

Michael ‘Mickey’ Altieri, 21, was arrested early Thursday morning in Windsor, Ohio, as the primary suspect in the Windsor College killings. Among the charges are first degree murder, attempted first degree murder and aggravated assault. Altieri has maintained his innocence and is being held on $1,000,000 bail in Windsor County Jail as he awaits trial.

The brutal killings that made national headlines were directly inspired by the ‘Ghostface’ murders in Woodsboro, California, two years prior and coincided with the release of STAB, a film based on Woodsboro survivor and reporter Gale Weathers’ book on the murders. Survivor Sidney Prescott was a student at Windsor College and targeted yet again in the latest string of murders. Allegedly, Altieri’s accomplice was Debbie Loomis, mother of one of the two original Ghostface killers, Billy Loomis. Mrs. Loomis was killed in an altercation prior to Altieri’s apprehension by police.

You looked away from her phone screen, feeling like your head was spinning though you weren’t even finished with your first drink. “Well, if he did all that stuff, why isn’t he on death row or something?”

“There was a mistrial. It was a huge thing,” Lee said. “You’ve seriously never heard of it?”

“No. Can you send that to me?” you asked.

“Yeah, I’ll send some podcast episodes and Youtube videos on it, too. You know I’m on that true crime shit.”

It took a few more drinks for you to be able to shake off the thought of your hot older coworker potentially being a serial killer, but the rest of your night with Lee was a lot of fun. She’d been one of your closest friends in college, and the two of you lived together when you first moved to New York. You knew she meant well, but damn, did that news put a damper on things.

You returned to your apartment a little after midnight, kicking off your heels at the door and collapsing on your couch, not bothering to make the short walk to your bedroom. 17 missed texts from Lee, all links to videos and podcasts about Mickey that she recommended.

Among the links Lee had sent you was a nearly hour long Youtube video titled: ‘What Happened at the Windsor College Ghostface Trial? A Deep Dive’. The woman in the thumbnail had a scared expression on her face, her eyes focused on that same mugshot of Mickey you saw in the old New York Times article.

Pressing on the link in your messages, you had the video come up on your TV instead, slouching back in your seat as it began to play.

‘I know most stuff about the Windsor College murders focus on just that, the murders, but I thought it’d be interesting to go into the trial that followed because it was almost like something out of a movie, but it doesn’t get as much attention as the killings, especially since there have been like two more Ghostface murder sprees since this happened. I’m just presenting facts and my own observations here for educational purposes, and it’s not my intention to imply guilt on anyone who hasn’t been convicted in a court of law. Before we get into it though, I wanna give a huge thank you to BetterHelp for sponsoring today’s video—‘

You rolled your eyes, skipping through the three-minute long sponsorship spiel.

‘So my sources for this video are Gale Weathers’ books Wrongly Accused: The Maureen Prescott Murder, The Woodsboro Murders, and College Terror. I also used James Chase’s book Ghostface on Trial, articles from newspapers and a few like lawyer journals that I was able to find online, and whatever stuff from the trial itself that’s public information. I have it all linked in the description—“

Pausing the video, you pulled up the New York Public Library website and searched for College Terror and Ghostface on Trial. Copies of both were available at the branch near your office, and you wasted no time in putting a hold on the books.

The next few minutes of the video gave an overview of the murders at Windsor College, which you half-paid attention to. You’d watched Stab 2 in high school, so you felt you were familiar enough with the killings. Thinking back on the movie, though, all of the characters had the same names as their real-life counterparts except for Mickey. Legal reasons, you assumed.

You turned up the volume on your TV as the video finally got into the details of the trial.

‘As soon as Mickey was arrested, theories were all over the news about what had happened and there was a ton of speculation about his guilt. James Chase, a controversial defense attorney from Chicago, took on the case pro-bono, stating in his book Ghostface on Trial that he knew he stood to make more money on a book deal, interviews, and speaking engagements by winning the case than whatever fees he’d get for representing Mickey. The defense focused on discrediting both of the prosecution’s star witnesses early on in the trial, planting seeds of doubt in the jury.

Chase and his team leaned heavily on the fact that three years prior, Sidney Prescott had incorrectly identified Cotton Weary as her mother’s killer when in fact it was Sidney’s former boyfriend Billy Loomis and their mutual friend Stu Macher who had committed that initial murder that led up to the original Woodsboro Ghostface murders.

Gale Weathers’ testimony was also discounted by the defense on the fact that she was a sensationalistic tabloid journalist who’d admittedly fabricated elements of her best-selling book on the Woodsboro killings. She claimed this was a result of editing and to achieve a better narrative flow.

The defense also said the deceased Debbie Loomis had more of a reason to go after Sidney and recreate her son’s Ghostface murders as revenge for his death. They pushed the idea that she acted with Sidney’s boyfriend, Derek, and that Mickey ended up getting caught in the crosshairs of what was a gruesome and unfortunate situation. Sidney maintained Derek’s innocence, but the fact that both he and Debbie were killed by gunshot wounds made it likely they were the Ghostface duo this time around.

Former Woodsboro Deputy Dewey Riley, another survivor of both Ghostface killings, was unable to testify because he was in a coma. He later said that because he was incapacitated before Sidney and Gale allegedly confronted Debbie and Mickey, he couldn’t say for sure who the killer or killers were, but he trusted their judgment and stood behind their testimonies.

It didn’t help either that Sidney was visibly distraught while on the stand and mixed up details of the original Woodsboro murders and the Windsor College ones. Gale was initially confident while being questioned by the defense, but later became combative when the inaccuracies in her books came up. In contrast, Mickey appeared calm and earnest, and seemed to have his story straight every time he took the stand.

There’s actually some footage of the trial that I was able to find, so I’m gonna play that now.’

The video was grainy, camera focused on an agitated-looking Sidney Prescott sitting in the witness stand. On the other side of the stand, a blond man in a gray suit read off from a stack of papers in his hand.

“Ms. Prescott, in your statement to police, you claimed that Mr. Altieri admitted to both you and Ms. Weathers that he had committed the murders with Debbie Loomis and wanted to get caught. Could you perhaps explain to myself and the jury, why exactly an alleged killer would want to get caught?”

“Because he’s fucking sick in the head!” Sidney exclaimed.

“Language, Ms. Prescott,” Judge Matthews said.

“He said he did it on purpose,” Sidney continued, her voice breaking. “He told us he wanted to get caught so he could blame it on the movies! He had everything planned out, the lawyers he wanted, the angle the media would take, he even quoted that line from Psycho, ‘We all go a little mad sometimes.’”

Chase furrowed his brow as he looked over the papers in his hands. “When did he say this? I’m not seeing that in your statement.”

“He said it right after he shot Randy,“ Sidney said.

“Randy wasn’t shot, he was stabbed.”

Sidney’s eyes widened. “I know. I meant—“

“Ms. Prescott, is there something you didn’t include in your police statement that you’re telling us now?”

Her voice was barely a whisper. “Billy quoted Psycho, after he shot Randy at Stu Macher’s house, not Mickey. I got mixed up.”

You gasped, bringing your hand to cover your mouth. The courtroom on your screen devolved into nothing short of pandemonium. The video then faded into Gale Weathers in the middle of being questioned by the defense. She, in contrast to Sidney, looked confident and well-put together under Chase’s grilling.

“Ms. Weathers, you wrote in your book that your camera man Kenny was gutted, when in actuality his throat was slashed, is that correct?”

Gale nodded. “It is.”

“Why the inconsistency?”

“All books, fiction or nonfiction go through an editing process. That was a decision made by my editor to establish a better narrative flow. It isn’t uncommon in the true crime genre by any means.”

“Better narrative flow isn’t the truth, though, is it?” Chase asked.

“Look, a book is a book. I’ll say right now under oath that Kenny was killed when one of those guys in the Ghostface costume slit his throat. I’ll also say under oath that Mickey Altieri did commit those murders with Debbie Loomis, and he confessed it to me and Sidney Prescott.”

“Your honor, this isn’t the only major inconsistency we’ve found in Ms. Weathers’ book on the Woodsboro murders. Yesterday we distributed to the prosecution and now present to the jury at least seventeen of these major inconsistencies.”

“What do you want me to say? I’m the cheesy tabloid journalist everyone thinks I am?”

The corners of Chase’s lips twitched. “Not quite my words.”

“You’re a real piece of work,” Gale scoffed.

The jury murmured among themselves at her shift in attitude. You found yourself chewing on your nail, enraptured by the trial. For the last time, the video faded out and then back in to show Mickey, your coworker, sitting on the witness stand. This time, the prosecutor was in front of him, his annoyed expression a contrast to Mickey’s calm demeanor.

“Mr. Altieri, we have signed affidavits from several of your former classmates that in your film theory class, you claimed in a heated argument with Randy Meeks and CiCi Cooper, both of whom were killed by this ‘Ghostface’ persona of yours—“

“Objection!” Chase shouted. “Claiming the Ghostface persona belongs to Mr. Altieri is an undue presumption of guilt.”

“Sustained,” Judge Matthews said. “I advise you to reconsider your wording going forward, counselor.”

The prosecutor huffed. “You claimed in a heated argument with Randy Meeks and Casey Cooper, both of whom were killed by the ‘Ghostface’ persona, that violent movies were responsible for influencing people to commit acts of violence, is that correct?”

“It was a classroom discussion. Our professor had brought it up because two fellow students were brutally killed at the premier of a slasher movie the night before, by someone dressed as the killer from that same slasher movie. I just thought it wasn’t a coincidence, and neither did half the other students in that class. Are you going to make them testify too?”

“Don’t deflect, Mr. Altieri.”

“I don’t understand how I’m deflecting. You asked me about a conversation I had with my classmates, and I answered.”

The video went back to the commentator, but you had goosebumps raised across your skin. You rewound back to the clip of Mickey’s testimony, staring at his face. Could he be a killer? Only a few days ago, you wouldn’t have even considered it. Now, you were down a rabbit hole that sent your mind reeling.

‘A lot of the prosecution’s evidence was dismissed as circumstantial by the defense. Mickey had alibis for all of the murders, even for the one Sidney claimed to witness him commit, allegedly shooting her boyfriend Derek. The chat room records and emails allegedly linked to Debbie and Mickey didn’t do much to convince the jury of Mickey’s alleged involvement in the murders. The records did positively identify Debbie based on the account’s password hints and her IP address. The other user was more tech savvy, changing IP addresses to make it more difficult to confirm an identity.

In move that was described as ‘sloppy’ and ‘desperate’ by the media following the trial’s conclusion, the prosecution also tried to claim that Mickey being the only other survivor among Sidney’s friends was suspicious and indicated his involvement, but the defense pointed out that Randy Meeks had also been the only other survivor of Sidney’s friend group in the original Woodsboro killings despite a gunshot wound like Mickey had, and later on at Windsor he was a victim.

Randy Meeks’ murder actually played a huge role in the defense’s strategy. Several Windsor College students saw Mickey elsewhere on campus during Randy’s murder. The final nail in the coffin was when Windsor County police confirmed that DNA in the news van where Randy was murdered was a match for Debbie Loomis. The police retested other evidence, but couldn’t find anything conclusive.

After weeks of questioning and evidence, the jury deliberated for a little over five days before returning to the judge in a deadlock. Judge Matthews declared a mistrial, and less than a year later, a district court dismissed the case on lack of substantial evidence and all charges against Mickey Altieri were dropped. Despite media speculation that he would, Mickey chose not to sue Sidney and Gale for defamation and hasn’t been in the public eye since the controversial trial.’

You stared blankly at your TV screen when the video ended, another one auto-playing a few seconds later. Even after your drinks with Lee, you felt way too sober to even process any of it. For the next few hours, you devoured videos, bookmarked dozens of articles, and sifted through podcast episodes to listen to during work.

The odd case had made its home in the recesses of your mind. You dreamed about him when you finally fell asleep, just before sunrise. Sitting in the downtown Manhattan office, the open floor layout was unusually bright, fluorescent lighting washing the place in an eerie white glow. Mickey walked over to his desk, blood dripping from his fingers, splattering on the carpet in a trail leading right to him. He looked at you, a smile on his face as he brought his upright, bloody index finger to his lips.

As the weekend flew by, you tried to keep yourself otherwise occupied. It wasn’t good for you to stay fixated on it, and certainly not fair to Mickey.

Working from home on Monday helped, as you focused on finishing the last of the onboarding process.

Tuesday was where things became tricky again. You sat on the forty-minute long subway ride to the office equipped with a podcast episode about your new coworker. The hosts didn’t seem to have much new information from what you took in the night before, except for the last few minutes of the episode where they’d gone off-script.

‘Last I saw online, he was living in Manhattan.’

‘Oh my god, that’s so Patrick Bateman-core.’

‘So you think he did it?’

‘It’s tough to say, like I totally get why the jury couldn’t come to a consensus.’

‘Yeah same, messy as hell. I tend to think that he didn’t do it. Innocent until proven guilty, ya know?’

‘I get that. We did try to get in touch with him for some kind of statement or even an interview—‘

‘Wishful thinking.’

‘Yeah, we looked for his email address, but I guess it wasn’t the right one because our message got bounced back, so that was a big fat bust.’

‘He’s like notorious for denying interview requests, anyway. I think he turned down book deals and stuff.’

Enraptured by the conversation, you nearly missed your stop. On the three block walk to your office, you hurriedly opened one of your playlists and put it on shuffle. The last thing you needed was for Mickey to somehow see on your home screen you’d just been listening to a podcast episode about him.

Your head was spinning by the time you got to your desk. He hadn’t arrived yet, and you felt a bit relieved that you had a little more time to psych yourself up. You shouldn’t have even had to do that in the first place, just be normal about your coworker, but if you learned anything over the weekend, even if he wasn’t guilty, he sure as hell wasn’t normal.

The elevator doors opened, and you looked up to see him walk out, waving at you.

“Morning, Y/N, have a good weekend?”

“Pretty good. I’m more broke than when it started, though. How about you?”

“Like I told you, hot date with Netflix,” he said, sitting down. “Thought you were sticking with shitty liquor?”

“I was, but my friend wasn’t. I got the tab, and she got plenty of margaritas.”

“Shit, I oughta get drinks with you sometime if you get all your friends’ tabs.”

You grinned. “Don’t count your luck.”

He chuckled to himself. The two of you worked in near silence for the next three hours, though you found yourself glancing over at him every so often, out of curiosity and also admiration. His graying hair suited him, and you could see the muscles in his arms from his casually rolled up shirt sleeves.

Soon, though, you found it hard to stay awake, the light from your computer screen adding onto your fatigue. To your horror, you yawned loudly, catching Mickey’s attention.

“You alright? I’m not too boring, am I?”

“No, I just kept waking up last night. I feel like I barely slept.”

“Why don’t we take an early lunch and go get coffee?”

“That sounds great,” you said, grabbing your purse.

There was a deli right up the block, and when you looked at the small pastry case, you decided to order something with your coffee. Mickey placed his order, a hot coffee and a bear claw. With plenty of tables to choose from, you and Mickey sat near the window.

Your coffee definitely hit the spot, and the sugar from your pastry helped wake you up too.

“How long’s your commute?” Mickey asked.

“About 40 minutes. I live in Brooklyn, kinda between Bushwick and Bed-Stuy.”

“Damn, that’s long. I live on the Upper West Side.”

You raised your eyebrows. “Wow. Before this job, I was barely able to afford to rent on my own.”

“It’s a rent-controlled building. I’m not making a ton after alimony and child support.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

He shrugged, though he looked out the window as he continued speaking. “It was a long time ago. Deanna and me just didn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of stuff when our son was born. I knew before he even got to kindergarten it was over.”

Unsure of how to respond, you slowly reached across the table, putting your hand over his. “I’m sorry, Mickey, really.”

“You’re a sweet girl,” he said, giving your hand a slight squeeze before releasing it. “They live upstate, so I don’t see them much. I have more time for going to the movies and Mets games.”

“I only go when they’re bad because tickets are cheaper.”

He snickered. “I should take a page outta your book. How about you? Any sports? Or reading? Isn’t true crime pretty popular with young women now?”

Your heart pounded at his question. Innocuous enough. True crime was extremely popular. The paranoid part of you couldn’t help but feel like it was an accusation. Then again, he couldn’t possibly know you’d spent the weekend immersing yourself in it, particularly stuff about him.

“I’m not really interested in that,” you said. “Sometimes my friends and I go to trivia nights at bars. I’m not that good, but it’s fun to just hang out. I have a membership at the MOMA, so I go there a lot. They show movies sometimes, too.”

To your relief, the conversation shifted to just that, and Mickey seemed surprised by some of your opinions on different movies. He told you he’d originally gone to college for film studies, which you already knew, of course. The odd thing was, while you certainly didn’t want him aware of just how much you knew about him, you didn’t feel guilty for it, just that he would be weirded out by it, obviously.

You and Mickey ended up talking about movies for nearly an hour and a half, well over your allotted hour lunch break, but he assured you no one would care that much. Still, the two of you half-ran back to the office, and something bubbled in your chest when he sat down and smiled at you, the wrinkles by his eyes becoming more prominent.

The rest of the workday went by quickly, and you headed to the library where you’d reserved the two books about the Windsor College murders and trial. By the time you got home, you’d already devoured the first two chapters of Gale Weathers’ book. Glad to be working remotely the following day, you let yourself stay up later than usual to read, getting to the halfway point before you could hardly keep your eyes open.

Weeks turned into months, and you absolutely loved your job, and the pay, but most of all, how the content you consumed and your proximity to Mickey seemed to feed into each other in a vicious cycle that increasingly drowned out the rational part of you that knew what you were doing was weird.

Still, it wasn’t like you were invading his personal privacy or treating him any different than you did before. All of the information you’d read, listened to, or watched was all public as your running list of books, podcasts, and documentaries on the matter grew. You’d even rewatched the Stab movies and started scrolling through threads and tags related to Mickey and what happened at Windsor College. After all of the personal research you did and how much you’d gotten to know Mickey at work, you couldn’t conclusively say whether or not he did it.

You tried keeping your obsession lowkey, but your friends seemed to notice how you’d shoehorn it into conversations. Lee had even told you she was afraid she’d created a monster by bringing up Mickey’s past in the first place. If she’d never made her comment or showed you that first article, you probably never would’ve known about it, remaining blissfully unaware and going about your business at your typical office job with your hot older coworker.

For how much time you spent at home between work and researching, it seemed like whenever you’d go out, you’d come home to something missing or moved. Articles of clothing gone, coffee mugs out of place, books not quite in the order you’d left them. At first, you chalked it up to your consuming too much true crime content, feeding into your paranoia, but when you asked your landlord to install another lock on your door, it all seemed to stop. That didn’t bode well with you.

Your fantasies blended with reality in your dreams, as you were having increasing occurrences of Ghostface or Mickey, or both, in them. Whenever you woke up, you didn’t remember much except for a warm feeling in your core. One dream remained vivid even after you awoke, though.

You were in your apartment alone, late at night, when you got a call from an unknown number. Normally, you didn’t pick up calls unless you were expecting them, but for some reason you picked up. The details of the phone call itself were jumbled, but you were frightened, running into your bedroom and locking the door behind you.

To your horror, you’d locked yourself in with Ghostface, the looming predator who looked at you emotionlessly, stalking toward you with his knife. When you turned around, the door knob was gone, and a black gloved hand grabbed your shoulder, moving you to face him as he pushed you against the door. He sliced through your slinky pajama top, exposing your breasts to him. Roughly groping each of them, he let out a low moan in appreciation before bringing the knife to your collarbone, dragging the blade to the valley between your breasts. Your breath hitched as he pressed it a bit deeper, but instead, you felt it in your pussy, like he was penetrating you.

“Give me a kiss, sweetheart,” your masked assailant ordered in a distorted voice.

Slowly, you leaned in, pressing your lips against the cold, hard plastic mask. You gasped as he dug the knife into your skin with one hand, his other slipping under your panties, pushing his fingers between your folds.

“I own you,” he said, clearly in Mickey’s voice this time.

You threw your head back in ecstasy as he pushed his fingers into your tight cunt, and then your alarm blared, jolting you awake. Turning over, you groaned into your pillow in frustration. At least it ended up being great masturbation material later on.

Another Thursday at work, seemingly uneventful as usual. You and Mickey had gotten into the habit of getting lunch together whenever you both were in the office. Maybe it was just wishful thinking, but as time went on, they felt more like dates than just a casual lunch with a coworker. Not that you were complaining.

“Got any plans for the weekend?” he asked in the nearby deli the two of you had begun to frequent.

“No, not really.”

“Do you wanna come over after work tomorrow? Watch a movie or something?” he asked.

“That’d be great!” you said, almost a bit too enthusiastically. “Should I bring anything?”

He shook his head, smiling a bit. “I can order a pizza.”

For some reason, you trusted yourself to be normal at his place, telling yourself throughout Friday that everything would work out fine. Being a weirdo about his alleged murders certainly wouldn’t help you get a real date with him, but your infatuation with him was only growing. You liked the slightest hint of danger about him, going to his apartment alone, wondering in the back of your mind what his true intentions were and feeling a bit of a thrill at the prospect that they could be anything less than innocent.

You showed up at his apartment that evening with a bottle of wine in hand, even though he’d told you not to bring anything. As expected, he thanked you for the wine, though he gave you an exasperated look as he let you into his apartment. Nicer than yours, but it still looked lived-in.

“Pizza will be here in a couple of minutes,” he said. “I’m thinking Mean Streets for the movie.”

“It’s a classic,” you agreed. “I love Harvey Keitel in it.”

“You know, that was De Niro and Scorsese’s first time working together.”

“Wait, why did I think Taxi Driver was first?”

“Came out in ‘76, just after he was in Godfather Part II in ‘74. Busy decade for him.”

“You’re telling me.”

The doorbell rang, the pizza arriving sooner than expected. You waited in the kitchen while Mickey dealt with the delivery.

“We can eat in the living room while we watch,” he said, carrying the pizza box inside. “I don’t have many people over, so it’s still a little messy.”

“That’s okay,” you assured him.

He put on the movie, and you balanced the paper plate on your lap, nodding along to “Be My Baby” as it played during the opening scene. Testing the waters, you scooted closer to him a few minutes into the movie. He glanced over at you, and you could’ve sworn you saw the faintest hint of a smile on his face.

You were especially pleased when he put his arm around you, not bothering with the pretense of a “move,” but rather taking what he wanted. Settling comfortably next to him, you tried to focus on the movie.

Despite his arm around your shoulders, closer physically to him than you ever had been, you felt restless. You knew when the halfway point of the movie was, and so you excused yourself to use the bathroom, telling him he didn’t need to pause it until you returned.

The tips of your fingers itched as you passed closed doors to the bathroom, which he told you was at the end of the hall. Biting your lip, you considered your options, and in a moment of impulse and weakness, you reached for one of the door handles. A mostly empty extra bedroom, maybe his son’s old room.

You weren’t deterred, opening another door. Jackpot. Slightly messy, with clothes strewn about the floor and on the dark sheets of his bed. Glancing behind you, you stepped into his room and looked around for anything that stood out.

Most people hid things under their beds, and so you got down on your hands and knees, wondering where exactly he might hide his—

“Don’t think this is the bathroom,” he said, startling you.

You yelped, frantically turning around as your brain short circuited for an explanation. “I—I was just—“

“Looking for trophies? All serial killers keep them, right?” he asked, towering over you from your spot on the floor. “Mementos of their victims or the kills.”

You shook your head frantically. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have been snooping.”

“No, you shouldn’t have, but you’re looking in the wrong place anyway,” he said, pulling the knife from behind his back.

“Serial killers also don’t—don’t kill people th-they know,” you stammered.

“Typically,” he agreed, “but I’m not typical, am I? I’m sure you’ve listened to plenty of those cute little podcasts where some dumbasses read the Wikipedia page about the Windsor College murders in between hawking security systems to their listeners that they’ve just scared shitless. I admitted I did it, went to fucking trial, and the jury couldn’t even find me guilty.”

“Point taken.”

“So, what trophy would I keep from you?”

You were silent for a moment before answering, looking him in the eye. “My panties.”

“Which pair? Figure I have at least five of them now. Unless you wanna make that six, sweetheart.”

“You’ve been breaking into my place all this time.”

“You made it way too easy. It’s like you were asking for it.”

Maybe you were. Regardless, you didn’t show any resistance when he lightly kicked at your leg, a silent command to stand up. You got to your feet, though your gaze was fixed on the knife in his hand. His eyes followed yours, and he smirked a bit before putting the knife aside.

He turned you around, pushing you back onto his bed. Your breath caught in your throat as he pushed your skirt up, his hand caressing your ass, fingers brushing the thin fabric of your panties.

“Were you asking for it, sweetheart? Have you wanted this all along? Been a bad girl to get my attention?”

“Yes,” you whimpered weakly, your pussy clenching around nothing.

“Y’know, I’ve heard of serial killers having groupies, but you,” he said, slapping your ass for emphasis, eliciting a moan from you, “are something else.”

“Fuck, daddy,” you whispered, fidgeting against his mattress.

“I’m disappointed in you.” Another smack on your ass. “I could’ve been having fun with you months ago.” Smack! You hissed this time, though your pussy was pulsing between your legs. “Bent you over my desk in the office, have my way with you while no one else is around—or maybe a little slut like you would wanna get caught with daddy’s dick buried inside her.”

He spanked you harder this time, holding you down when your body instinctively recoiled at the impact. A pained moan escaped your lips as he pressed his body weight against you, his clothed cock rubbing against your tender skin. Tears welled up in your eyes as the sensation, and you resisted the urge to slip your hand between your legs.

“Or maybe,” he said, reaching around you to wrap his hand around your neck, “you just want me to fuck you before I kill you. Probably cum the minute I put that old Ghostface mask on, huh, baby?”

You let out a strangled moan at his words. “Yes, daddy.”

He released his grip on your throat, standing up to give you one more slap across your ass. “Turn over. If you’re good for me, maybe I’ll give you what you want.”

The friction from his sheets stung against your sore ass as you rolled over to look at him, though he grabbed you, pushing you onto your back himself. His grip on you was tight, fingers digging into your arms as he held you down beneath him, completely at his mercy.

He pulled off your skirt and panties, leaving your pussy exposed for him. He dragged his index finger between your folds, and you whimpered when he brushed your clit.

“God, you’re soaked,” he murmured against your lips. “Was it the spanking, or is it the serial killer thing?”

“Both.”

“Good answer,” he said, lazily circling your clit with his finger.

He ducked his head down, wasting no time in devouring your wet cunt. His tongue relentlessly flicked at your clit while he slid two fingers inside you, pumping them in and out of your hole. You took them easily, but wondered if it’d be the same for his cock when he’d undoubtedly fuck you.

Your hands gripped his sheets as he worked his tongue, your feet curling at the tension you felt building up inside of you. He moaned against you, loud enough that it felt like his voice rocked through your body.

“Don’t stop,” you pleaded breathlessly.

A pained and outraged whine pulled from your throat when he did just that. You looked down at him between your legs, betrayed.

“Why should I let you cum?” he teased, rubbing light circles in your clit with his soaked fingers. “You’ve been a bad girl.”

“Oh fuck,” you moaned. “Please, daddy.”

“You can do better than that, sweetheart.”

“Please let me cum, daddy. I’ll be so good. I—I’ll do anything, just—please,” you cried out in frustration of being so close yet not quite there.

“Only since you asked so nicely,” he relented, dipping his head back down between your legs, his hands holding your hips in place as your lower half began to quiver at his touch.

You could feel his lips move slightly against your sensitive pussy, nothing short of a smug expression on his face at making you fall apart so easily. It didn’t matter, your head was swimming, muscles strained as he brought you closer to climax. Grabbing his hair, you pressed his face closer against your pussy, grinding against it in desperation.

“Mickey—Fuck—“ you choked out as your orgasm wracked through you, fireworks in between your legs as your body shook.

He ate you out through your orgasm, and another tidal wave of pleasure hit you all at once, almost painful and overwhelming, your brain on fire at the sensation. You could hardly catch your breath when you released your grip from his hair and he lifted his head, your wetness glistening on his lips.

When he kissed you, you hardly had the strength to kiss him back, though tasting yourself on his mouth sent a rush through you. He pressed sloppy kisses to your face, trailing down to your neck. His hard length rubbed against your slick-coated thigh, a low growl coming from deep in his throat.

“W-Wait, can I ask you something?”

“Shoot,” he mumbled against your skin.

“Did you really wanna get caught?”

He stopped, lifting his head from your neck to look at you a few moments before answering, “Yeah, blame the movies, make a real circus of the trial, but my attorney said he didn’t think I could pull off an insanity plea because I was too put together. Obviously pleading guilty and confessing everything wouldn’t get nearly as much attention as actually going on trial. I was pissed at first, but it worked out, I mean I had every reporter eating out of the palm of my hand by day three.”

“Why don’t you do interviews now? Or write a book?”

“What’s there to say? Not the truth.”

“I guess that makes sense,” you muttered. “Are you gonna kill me?”

“Probably should,” he said, the slightest smirk ghosting his lips as his eyes raked over you, “I might need more convincing not to.”

#mickey altieri x reader #ghostface x reader #ghostface #slasher x reader #mickey altieri #scream #scream 2 #slasher fandom #slasher community #scream franchise

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poeticpains · 6 months

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Poe's Giffing Tutorial (From One Beginner to Another)

Hey, everyone! So, I've been thinking about this for a while, and decided to finally make it happen. This post aims to be a giffing tutorial that isn't a bunch of technical jargon that nobody except experienced giffers understands. This is for the person that I was when I first started out: someone who wants to make gifs, for free, without having to learn the entirety of a new program. As such, if you're already familiar with the basics, this probably won't be super helpful to you.

In this, I'll cover the basics of actually capturing a gif, the how-to of color correction (though without getting into the nitty-gritty detail of it), some basic text effects, and some more decorative effects like overlays and ~fancy coloring. I'll also show you the program I use to resize gifs.

I don't have a fun quip to lead us into the next part, so, uh, let's just dive in.

Tools*:

A PC capable of handling heavy processor loads (I use a mid-range gaming laptop; it's a little slow sometimes, but it works)

Whatever you're giffing (obviously...)

ScreenToGif (a free, basic screencapture program)

Photopea (a free, in-browser Photoshop dupe)

RedKetchup (a free file resizer/converter)

*Note: These are not the end-all, be-all of gifmaking. They may not even be the best tools for the job! But they're free, they work well, and they're relatively intuitive.

Step 1: Capture your gif.

I'm going to use ScreenToGif for this. The first thing I do is open the program and click Recorder, which opens the recording interface.

I click and drag (or manually input dimensions in the boxes next to the recording button in the lower right corner) to set my dimensions, and then I press record. The red "Record" button will change to a blue square that says "Stop," and a timer will appear in the upper right corner, showing how many seconds your gif is.

Generally, I'll pause the video 5-10 seconds before my desired start time, to give myself a buffer (you'll be able to delete those frames later), start the recording, and then start the video. You'll probably find a system that works for you once you do it a few times.

Once the scene that I want to capture is done, I'll click the blue "Stop" button, and the overlay will close itself. A few seconds later, depending on how long/complex/large your gif is, the program will pop up with a new window where you can edit. Here's what it looks like:

You can do a lot with ScreenToGif, but we'll be using the dead simple stuff today. Click the "Edit" tab, fourth from the left, and this will show up.

"Delete All Previous" and "Delete All Next" are our friends here. Go to the FIRST frame that you want in your gif, using either your arrow keys or just dragging the slider, and select it. Then hit "Delete All Previous." This will make that frame the first frame of your gif. Then, go to the LAST frame of your gif, and hit "Delete All Next." This makes the last frame of the scene that you want the last frame of the gif. You can also use the "Delete" option to delete frames by selecting them with your cursor if you want a more manual option.

Now you have your raw gif! Go to the "File" tab, the first one on the left, and select "Save As" from the menu. You want to make sure that it's saving as a .gif file, not an .mp4 or .apng --- you can check this up at the top. Don't worry, though, as .gif is the default, so unless you change it, you should be golden. Select whatever folder you want to put it in, name it, and save it.

You could absolutely stop here. It is by no means required to color your gifs or slow them down or any other number of things associated with giffing. But if you want to, here's how I do it.

Step 2: Edit your gif.

Head on over to Photopea. You'll see this:

What we want is the "Open From Computer" option. Click it, and your File Explorer will show up. Navigate to whatever folder you saved your gif in and select it by double clicking or clicking once and hitting "Open."

It'll open in a new workspace that looks like this.

You may be saying, "Gee, Poe, that sure looks a lot like Photoshop!" Yes, it absolutely does. If you're familiar with Photoshop, you will most likely be able to find your way around Photopea just fine, and can probably go from here. But if you're not familiar with Photoshop, here's the basics.

First thing's first: gifs are frequently pretty fuzzy/blurry. Luckily, sharpening them is easy.

Select all your frames (the list on the right with all the numbered layers) by clicking one end, scrolling up/down, holding Shift, and clicking the other end. Then go up to the tabs and do Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen. This will automatically sharpen each frame using a percentage; the default is, I believe, 150%, and this is usually what I use because I am fundamentally lazy.

If you don't select all your frames, only the one that you're currently on (the one highlighted in a lighter color) will get the effect applied to it. This goes for basically anything you do, so it's good to get in the habit of selecting all.

Now that it's sharpened, we can color it. Go up to the tabs again, and go to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > [whatever you want to adjust]. Most commonly in Escape the Night, you'll have to adjust brightness, because there's a lot of dark, moody scenes; Season 3 is also especially yellow/orange tinted, so you'll probably want to color correct it, too, using the Color Balance adjustment layer. This is a total guessing game based on the exact scene you're doing and my method is just selecting random things and adjusting sliders until it looks good (remember: fundamentally lazy). Honestly, I'm not an expert in coloring gifs, so I won't pretend to be — especially since people can and do write entire posts just dedicated to it. For this gif, I'm just lightening it a little.

And if this is all you want to do — no text, no effects — you're done! Go to File > Export As > GIF. It will take a few moments to load, so don't panic when your page freezes. A new window will pop up that allows you to do things like set looping, time, etc. but you can also just "Save" and you're done!

But let's say you want something fun. Maybe you'd like to overlay a quote or make it a cool color. If that's the case, continue on...

Step 3: Make your gif shine.

Three parts in this: text, fun colors, and overlays. You can combine these three to do some awesome things, and they're all very simple to do, once you know what you're doing. Think of them less like steps and more like a mix-and-match deal. You can use one, two, or all three!

So, here we go.

Option 3a: Add some text.

The easiest option of the three, this one works exactly like you think it does. The uppercase T symbol on the sidebar will create a new text layer where you can type something and set a font, size, and color.

I'll spare you the lecture on typography that I could give you — you can find better ones than I could make. Generally, though, you have a decorative/display font for headings and emphasis, and then a different, more generalized font for subheadings and other things. In this, the display font is Heavy Heap, which was used on the Season 3 tarot cards, and the general font is a relatively generic serif font.

(Sidenote: you can load fonts into Photopea! Just go to a font website like Dafont, download the font you want, and then open it as you would any other file by going to File > Open and selecting it from your files. You should get a message that says "Font [Your Font Name Here] Loaded," and then you'll be able to use it in your design. That's how I got Heavy Heap in there.)

You can change size and color with these, which will show up at the top when you select the text tool. Keep in mind that if you're making changes after you type something out, you will need to select (highlight) the text you want to change — it won't do it automatically.

I will admit that Photopea's text editor is not the cleanest, simplest, or nicest to use, especially at first. I came from Canva where it was much faster and easier. The downside, of course, is that Canva is highly limited with what you can do.

There are also ways to warp the text, change the blending, and do outlines, but I'll leave that for another time as to avoid making this any longer than it already is.

Option 3b: Make it a cool color.

You have a couple different ways to do this. Probably the most intuitive is to go to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Photo Filter. Select the color box, pick the color you want using the picker or a hex code, select your desired density, and click OK. Boom, color over your gif.

It defaults to this vintage-y orange, but you can pick whatever color your heart desires.

However, I usually use a different method using Gradient Maps. This is also pretty easy; Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Gradient Map. If you leave it black and white, by the way, you get a B&W gif (you can also just select the Black and White option in the Adjustment Layer menu). Click on the gradient, select the white square on the right side of the gradient line, and then select the square down at the bottom of the window and change it to whatever color you want.

For this gif, I'm leaving it B&W.

(You can have a lot of fun with gradient maps. Play around with them!)

Option 3c: Overlay another gif on top.

Ooookay, so, this is the most advanced and tedious of effects to do (at least of the ones documented in this post), but it's worth it, I promise. For this, you'll need at least one other gif. I usually use a base gif that's relatively neutrally colored, oftentimes B&W but sometimes just faded or pastel, plus one (or more than one) colored, brighter gif. These are, of course, just guidelines — combine whatever gifs you want. The only real requirement, per se, is that they have the same amount of frames. If they don't, it'll look weird. (But if you do end up with two gifs that have different amounts of frames, you can delete the difference right in Photopea, so I don't stress about it too much.)

You also generally want to add text after this step, so if you're planning on doing this, save the text for last.

First things first: color your gifs the way you want and then save both of them. Then re-open them both in Photopea. Yes, this is annoying. I did say it was tedious.

So now I have both of them in my navbar, labeled as "tutorial base" and "tutorial overlay."

Go to your overlay gif and right-click on the gif folder. This is the top layer with a little arrow and folder icon next to the name of the gif.

Select "Duplicate Into" and then pick your base gif in the popup. In my case, it's named "tutorial base."

Now you'll click over to your base gif, and you'll see that your accent has been put on top of your base. Now you get to have fun with blending!

Right click on the overlay gif's folder again. Then, select Blending Options, which is the first menu item. It'll bring up a popup with all sorts of options for styling your layer.

The default setting is Pass Through, which is what we see here. If you want, you could just change the opacity to get your desired effect.

You could also play around with blending options such as Overlay, Color Burn, Lighten, and Screen. Every gif is different, and every gif will look different with different options, so experiment and see what looks best! You may have to go back and recolor it a few times, so I recommend just keeping the project open in your navbar for easy access.

For this gif, I think I'll go with Darker Color at 67%.

One last step, and then you're done with blending!

Go to Layer > Animation > Merge. This will merge each frame of your animation (the gifs) with each other, meaning that they'll play at the same time. If you forget this step, as I do frequently, you'll go to save your gif and find that it plays as a sequence.

Once you've merged your gifs, you can add texts, more effects, PNG overlays, whatever you want! Congrats! You did it!

Step 4: Resize your gif (if necessary).

Maybe you've made a gif, and it's beautiful, and it's amazing, and you wanna show everyone...but it's five million megabytes and you can't send or post it anywhere. Tumblr's max file size is 10 MB, while Discord's (standard) max file size is..7 MB, I think? Either way, if you try to upload something bigger than that, you'll get an error message and the familiar taste of disappointment.

Never fear, Redketchup is here!

This is Redketchup, and it's super simple.

Go to "GIF Resizer" under Animation Tools. Upload your gif, then scroll until you see the Resize GIF section. Input the percentage you'd like to reduce it by (presets are 25%, 50%, and 75% smaller, but you can set it manually, as well).

This is also the step where you can slow it down if you desire if you didn't do it in Photopea — it's in the next section down. Set the speed, if you'd like, and then go down to the bottom and hit Download.

It'll take you to a preview tab where you can check if your gif is small enough. If it is, hit Download again up in the top left, and that's that! Go share your gif with the world!

Conclusion:

Thank you for reading! I am by no means an expert gifmaker, but I want to spread the love and give other people the option to do it. I wouldn't know any of this stuff without the people who taught me, and I'll put a list of tutorials down at the bottom that I referenced when I was first learning to make gifs.

At any rate, if you use this post to make a gif, feel free tag me or send it to me so I can see! And for those of you who are on the fence about learning or starting to gif...

Do it. I double-dog dare you.

References:

Blending Gifs by @the-mother-of-lions

Photopea Coloring Tutorial by @heroeddiemunson

Merging in Photopea by @bellamyblakru

And, though not a specific reference, I frequently browse @usergif for inspiration (they have tutorials there, as well, but I haven't checked them out yet).

#gifset #giffing #gif tutorial #how to gif #how to make a gif #photopea #escape the night #etn #I wrote this instead of socializing at my family's thanksgiving dinner #because that's just who I am

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eldritchnebula · 1 month

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GLAZING ART PSA

Hi hello I am but a humble artist trying to survive the war against Artifical Intelligence and its current grip on the artistic world.

As many of you know, Glaze is a great program to use when protecting your creations against AI data scrapping.

However you need to be very careful with your settings when it comes to glazing your art. ESPECIALLY if you are like me and like to put a noise filter/chromatic aberration over your artworks.

Glaze doesn't seem to like glazing art with this filter and the way it changes your art is significant. Here is an example:

The Artwork Normally:

As you can tell in the artwork, there is a very faint noise filter over all of it.

The Artwork with Medium Intensity and Medium Render Quality (Took 4-6 mins tops with my gaming laptop)

As you can tell, this setting absolutely ate my artwork alive. I did these settings for the sake of my computer.

The Artwork at Default Intensity and Maximum Render Quality (Took 10-15 mins tops with my gaming laptop)

This is the best I can get with glazing this artwork and all of my other artworks I plan to upload to my website with the same filter. It is SIGNIFICANTLY better than the medium settings one, but you can still see imperfections.

TL;DR:

Glaze struggles with glazing artwork with filters such as a noise filter or chromatic aberration filter. Default Intensity and Maximum Render does the best job at not decimating your artwork, but doing so can add strain to your computer. (View examples above)

If anyone here knows any work arounds for this, feel free to send me an Ask and I will edit this post. I will greatly appreciate it.

Keep creating, y'all. AI won't win against us.

-Nebula

#signal boost #art glaze #ai protection #artists on tumblr #artist support #ai art isnt art

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lust-for-sacher · 8 months

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Peppermint tea

Here is 2300-ish words little thing inspired by the current events. This is all fluff, meant to feel like a warm cup of tea. It's about the reader willing to make Noah feel better about his voice issues. It's not set in the present nor in any specific time.

(***) are omissions.

Not betaed.

I wish Noah a super fast recovery and all the good things in this world <3 The band and everybody else did a great job in Denver and Salt Lake City. They all deserve the best!

🌿

I slowly, quietly climbed inside the tour bus, trying to make as little sound as possible, careful not to hit the walls with the big backpack I was carrying on one of my shoulders. I found Bryan waiting for me sitting at the table in the main lounge, working at his laptop in the 9:30 pm darkness, with a white cup of coffee reflecting the light coming from the street poles outside.

The window he was sitting at was the only one in the whole bus with the curtains open. Hearing that someone was approaching, he lifted his eyes to check who it was. When he noticed it was me, his tired, hard eyes softened. His black circles were evident enough though, impossible to hide in the bright light coming from the screen in front of him, which only accentuated them.

“Hey y/n,” he greeted me with a warm smile. “I’m glad you made it. All good?”

“All good,” I half-whispered.

I walked by his side and looked at the screen. He was editing a video, apparently a pretty complicated one given the look of the project on Premiere. I looked at the still image in the program monitor. It was a clip showing a close up on Noah, beaming at the cheering crowd at the end of one of their songs.

I pursued my lips, shifted my stance. “Is it coming along nicely?” I asked.

Bryan leaned back on his seat and stretched one arm behind his head.

“Yeah…” He rewinded the video, clicked play and we watched together the first 10 seconds of the clip he was working on. “This is for Instagram, it’s gonna be huge, hopefully,” he commented. “I took some sick shots with the drone.”

He navigated through some folders on the hard drive which was lying nearby on the table and opened a video for me, audio off. It was indeed an amazing video, with the flames and all. We watched it in silence, then Bryan took a sip of his coffee.

“Do you want something to drink, or something to eat? Grab whatever you want,” he whispered, putting his laptop in standby and closing its lid.

“No, thanks. I’m fine. I ate something before coming here.”

Bryan nodded and then glanced outside. Matt, Jesse and Jolly were peering inside through the glass. They all waved at me. Bryan gestured to them that he was coming, mouthing a “just a second”.

“I’m going for a drink with them,” he said, rubbing one eye and slowly standing up. I took a step back and made some room for him. “Noah won’t even notice we’re leaving.”

“How is he?” I asked. Bryan was now standing right in front of me. Outside the guys were talking to each other, looking at the street.

Bryan took a deep breath and looked to the side. He shook a half empty bottle of water standing on the table and it took him a couple seconds to answer, lifting his eyes back on me and pulling out a faint smile.

“He’ll probably be very happy to see you,” he said softly. It was not an answer to my question, but I accepted it as such. “I think he’s back there still working on the audio track for this video,” he added, looking at the closed door leading to the corridor passing through the bunk beds and reaching the studio room at the rear end of the tour bus. He regarded me for a second more. “See you later, y/n. I’ll text you when we come back," he smiled. "I’m so happy you came."

He walked past me, grabbed his jacket and then stepped out of the bus to join the others, closing the door behind his back. It was now just me and Noah in the bus, even if he didn’t know I was there yet. I slid the backpack off my shoulder and placed it in an empty place on the sofa. While stripping off my jacket, my eyes fell on the kitchen counter. There were two boxes of tea, chamomile and peppermint, and a jar of honey with a spoon resting on top of the lid. I sighed at the sight of it and went to examine the teas.

I knew all about those. Noah had told me about all kinds of remedies he had tried, during our last phone call that morning. He’d thought I was on some errands in a mall, but instead I was at the airport, sitting in a café at the departures, ready to leave for my one hour flight to join them for a couple days while they were on tour. I wanted to surprise him and I’d organized everything with Matt as soon as I had known about Noah’s issues and I got the confirmation that I could get four days off from my job. I wanted to offer him my support the best way possible, being physically present.

Matt was very glad I could come.

“He’s losing it,” he had told me that morning, in hushed tones, when I called him after hearing from Noah, and I could only trust his account after having spoken with the subject of our conversation himself. “He’s on fucking edge since last night. He couldn’t sleep. He’s not eating,” Matt had continued, adding some concerning details about Noah’s condition. “I’m so glad you can make it. So, so glad about it. He really needs… something… right now. We canceled the show in *** and thank God he now has two days to recover, but he’s so stressed about what if he can’t get better in time. Oh god, he’s impossible to even talk with!” Some frustration was seeping through Matt’s words. “I have my plate full as well! I can’t deal with that and him at the same time!”

Matt had sighed on the phone. He and Noah had always got along very well, but being two strong personalities, sparks would easily fly in moments of tension.

“But…” Matt had figuratively taken a step back. “I’m sorry y/n. I- I don’t mean to sound harsh… You know him, more or less you also know how it is in this kind of situation. He gets so hard on himself and when the problem’s basically just him he’s impossible to reason with- Hold on, he’s coming.”

I’d heard Noah calling Matt. Matt had probably been pacing outside around the tour buses while they were on a brief break at some gas station on their way to ***. Noah had approached him and presumably asked who was on the phone.

“Brenda,” Matt had lied to him. I had no clue who this Brenda was. She could have been his dog sitter for all I knew, or his chiropractor. After a couple seconds of silence I heard Noah’s voice again. He announced that he was going to try to take a nap for a couple hours. Matt had acknowledged that and Noah had left.

“Oh, thank God,” Matt had whispered on the phone once Noah was out of earshot.

“Nice," I smiled. "It seems I’ve managed to convince him to rest. It took me fifteen minutes before calling you. You owe me now, Matt,” I jested.

Matt had let out a sigh of relief. “Take my house, take my cars, take whatever you want y/n. Thank you!”

Unfortunately that nap proved to be kind of fruitless for Noah. In the late afternoon he had texted me saying that he had slept very poorly, waking up even more tired than before. They were reaching *** and so was I. He thought I was heading back home after work, but in reality I was in a taxi on the same highway they were traveling on.

I placed the tea box I was rolling around in my hands down on the counter. I was excited to see Noah, I couldn’t wait, but I was also kind of nervous. I was not sure about what his reaction would be when he saw me appear in front of him without notice, especially in these circumstances. He was kind of like a wounded animal right now, on edge, as Matt had said, and for sure not in his best mood. If he was actually working on some music, there was a chance he was a bit more relaxed, but again, I was not sure.

I finger brushed my hair back and pressed the button to open the sliding door to the corridor leading to the bunkbeds and the studio. I instantly noticed that this area of the bus felt a couple degrees cooler.

The A/C was on. Some dim light poured from a wall lamp in the back lounge into the corridor.

I saw Noah’s silhouette in the distance, sitting at the small table at the very end of the bus, giving his back to the room, wearing a pair of headphones. All was silent except from a small tapping sound. He was tapping his fingers on the table, counting beats or keeping some rhythm. I shouldn't have worried about talking in hushed tones with Matt, Noah was not going to hear me unless he turned and saw me or I touched him. He was probably going to get a heart attack if I couldn’t think of some way to not scare him.

I closed the door behind me and then slowly walked by the bunk beds on the soft carpet. Most of the beds had the curtains drawn, even if there was nobody there. I spotted Noah’s bed among the other ten. Apparently he was sleeping above someone else in the only compartment with just two bunk beds instead of the usual three. I recognized his bed because of one of his Tokyo Ghoul shirts lying on the pillow.

I took my last couple steps and stopped at the threshold of the studio room. I could now see Noah better. He was in front of his MacBook, working on a Logic project. He was leaning on the table with both of his arms, with a cup of tea by his left - I had noticed the green tag of the peppermint tea bag hanging from the rim of the cup. He was wearing a hooded hoodie and something that looked like a scarf was hanging from one of his knees, folded in a heap on his lap. He stopped tapping on the table to take a sip of tea, and then resumed his work, now also bobbing his head keeping the tempo.

I leaned on the door frame and took my phone out from my pocket.

“Is that peppermint tea good?”

I texted him.

I heard his phone buzz in his pants a nanosecond after. It took him a good minute to pause his work and flip his phone out. He opened the message and froze, staring at it. I saw him lean back on his seat and slowly pull his headphones down his neck.

Oh. I had to be extremely quiet now.

He sent me a reply.

“I am drinking it right now actually...?”

I had to stifle a small laugh.

“I know :) And you should wear that scarf... It’s not gonna help your throat if you use it to keep your knees warm.”

Noah jolted. He looked to his left, back at his phone, and then finally he turned and looked over his shoulder. He saw me leaning at the door, smiling from ear to ear.

“y/n!” he exclaimed, two huge eyes setting on me. He quickly stood up, dragging the headphones with him, making the scarf fall on the ground and getting his legs tangled in some cables. “Oh shit,” he had to glance down at the cables to quickly disentangle himself as best as he could. “y/n!” he exclaimed again, incredulous. His voice faltered, cracked. “How- Who- I mean, when did you arrive?!”

I was skipping toward him. He stepped around the sofa and we met in the middle of the room in a bone crushing hug.

“Oh my god!” he exclaimed against my shoulder, almost lifting me up in his embrace, squeezing me tightly. “Oh my!” He sounded so happy, almost in tears.

I was in tears. I’d felt my eyes prickle the moment I saw him standing up and coming towards me, the moment I saw his sunken eyes and his tired, lackluster appearance lighten up at my sight.

“Noah!” I sighed by his ear, and I didn’t know what to add right there and then. His hair was tickling the side of my face. He was breathing on my shoulder in big gasps, warming up the skin under my sweater, and his hands were moving around my back, unable to find a place where to rest. He was all around me. The very air I breathed carried his scent.

He gave me a last squeeze and pulled back a little to look at my face, which was probably pretty red and also tears stricken by now. His eyes too were glittering in the dim light as he looked at me, perhaps still a bit incredulous of the fact that I was there.

“...How?” he asked again, still beaming.

“Matt and the others knew. I took a flight this morning and - ” I waved a hand in the air. “Well, now I’m here!”

Noah stared at me, looking at a loss for words.

“I came for you,” I added, trying to maintain the smile on my lips. “I can't stand knowing that you're not feeling well and not being able to be there with you.”

Noah took a shallow, shaky breath. He opened his mouth, but didn’t say anything. I saw various emotions cross his face in just a couple seconds.

I tiptoed and reached for the side of his neck, since I couldn’t properly cup the side of his face when he was standing at his full height. He took the cue and bent a little to receive my kiss, allowing me to take him to the sectional, having him sit down, climb beside him and dispel all of his worries at least for a while, covering him in kisses and cuddles that melted him down in a matter of minutes.

___________

I'm on AO3 as YavannaK!

xoxo

#noah sebastian #noah sebastian fanfiction #bad omens fanfiction

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